The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells, on Hallmark Channel
IMDb; Sonar Entertainment; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon

Caution, spoilers.

So, I guess this first aired in 2001, over three nights. I don't even recall if I was aware of it or not, at the time, but if I was, I must have forgotten about it. In 2013, I happened to see a 2-disc DVD that included this and P.T. Barnum, a miniseries from 1999 that I did sort of recall having wanted to see, but never having had the chance. So I bought it mainly for that, but this certainly sounded like it'd be kinda cool, too. So, you know... bonus. (Actually, I'd say it turned out that I liked this one better.) The movies don't seem to have anything in common other than being made by the same company, I think. And of course the fact that Barnum and Wells are both known by their initials. (Now that's what I call synergy. Wait... no it isn't.) Anyway, H.G. Wells has appeared in so many different shows and movies, as a fictional character, because science fiction writers clearly love to imagine that the things he wrote about actually happened to him, in some form or another... which I guess Wells himself actually started, in some of his own writing. Most commonly such shows involve time travel, of course, because of one of his most famous novels, "The Time Machine." But this miniseries adapts (loosely, I'm guessing) six of his short stories, which I've never read, as far as I can recall.

Part One
The story begins one rainy night in 1946, when a woman named Ellen McGillvray shows up at at his home, claiming to be a newspaper reporter who wanted to interview him about a scientist who'd recently died, named Cedric Gibberne. Wells had known him when they were both young men. So as the old Wells tells the story, the scene flashes back to 1893. At the time, Wells was a struggling writer, who was friendly with a young woman named Jane Robbins... and he clearly wanted to be more than friends with her. He follows her to the Imperial College of Science, where she was a teacher. Gibberne was a professor there, and he was about to show his class some scientific experiment, but the machine he was using suddenly vanished, and doors on either side of the classroom were blown off their hinges. So, Wells and Jane begin investigating the incident, though later investigations are done by Wells and Gibberne. Meanwhile, there was another professor named Mark Radcliffe, who was already dating Jane. Um... I don't want to say anything about the result of the investigation (though of course there's a science fictiony explanation for everything). I totally predicted what had happened from the very beginning, but it was still fun to see the story unfold. And by the end of it all... well, for a reason I won't reveal, Jane and Mark couldn't be together anymore.

I should say that the scenes in 1946 don't just happen between stories, but also periodically throughout each individual story. Anyway, after the first story, McGillvray gives Wells a notebook he'd written later in 1893, which contained a story he didn't exactly remember. Apparently the notebook had been in the possession of Gibberne. Now Wells reads it to refresh his memory, and the second story begins. There was an electrical engineer named Arthur Brownlow, who'd received a massive shock one day, and woke up to find himself a week in the past. So he knew various things that would happen, and used this knowledge to the advantage of himself and a pub full of friends... however, as always happens in stories like this, eventually his meddling with the natural course of events ended up changing things for the worse. The ending is somewhat happy, though. And it explains why Wells's own memory of events was lacking. Anyway, after that story, he informs McGillvray that he knew she wasn't what she claimed to be, and she reveals the truth about who she is and why she really wanted to see him. And then she takes him to the secret government facility where Gibberne had conducted his research, before he died. And that concludes part one of the miniseries.

Part Two
McGillvray shows Wells a mysterious egg-shaped crystal that had been among Gibberne's possessions. Or at least, it used to be a crystal; now it was basically just a rock, albeit a rock that was impervious to things like acid and diamond-tipped drills. So, Wells told the story of the thing. Um... back in 1893, he and Jane were dating (it looked like they may have been doing so during the second story of part one, but now it's very definite). Anyway, there was this guy who saw the crystal thing streak through the sky and hit the ground, apparently a meteorite. Later, he sold it to a shopkeeper named William Cave, who had a shrewish wife named Rosa. Of course Wells and Jane eventually get involved in figuring out what the thing actually is. I won't say exactly, but I will say it's from Mars, and the miniseries suggests that the incident inspired him to write "The War of the Worlds," though this "real" incident is very different from that fictional one. Anyway... this was definitely the scariest of the stories in the miniseries, and while the ending has an element that is darkly humorous, I'd still say it's mostly just deeply disturbing. (Oddly, Wells and Jane don't seem particularly disturbed by it, while Cave is quite understandably happy about it.)

After he finishes telling that story, McGillvray asks about a file the Navy has on him, which they wouldn't let her read. That leads to the story of a lab assistant named Sidney Davidson, who was strangely affected by an accident during an experiment being conducted by a professor named Dr. Symonds. Davidson seemed to be raving, having hallucinations; he saw a naval ship being wrecked in a storm, and then found himself stranded on an island. He was quite convinced that that's where he actually was, and while he could hear people talking to him where he really was (safely in London), he couldn't see them. Jane had also been assisting with the experiment, and wanted to help Davidson, so of course Wells got involved. It seems the ship had been conducting the same type of experiment as Professor Symonds, at the same time. However, the Navy didn't want to admit that the ship even existed. Luckily, Davidson's uncle- Sir Frederick Masterman, the dean of the college- was good at getting what he wants. More importantly, Davidson's vision actually proved useful to the Navy, in a way I won't reveal.

I should also say that at one point during part two of the miniseries, Jane moved in with Wells, which was a bit scandalous, for the era. (In reality, according to Wikipedia, Wells left his wife for Jane, but in the miniseries, he wasn't married. Even so, living together without being married really was seen as "living in sin.") Though Wells and Jane clearly didn't care what anyone else thought, and really, the miniseries barely hints at what others might think. Um... and back in 1946, McGillvray takes Wells to meet the scientist who's taken over, now that Gibberne is dead. And it's someone we'd seen before, a man named Whittaker, who in the flashbacks to 1893 had been Gibberne's lab assistant at the college. Whittaker shows Wells something quite strange... which ends part two.

Part Three
The story begins right in 1893, and we don't see 1946 until the end of Wells's latest story. He knew this brilliant mathematician named Albert Pyecraft, a teacher at an elementary school, I guess. Pyecraft was tutoring a young woman named Violet, who was a servant at a gentlemen's club to which he and Wells both belonged. He obviously had romantic feelings for her, though he hid the truth from her, believing she could never love him, because he was obese. However, he had another friend at the club, named Mark Pattison, who was himself quite displeased about his own lack of hair. So Pattison went to a mysterious pharmacist someone had recommended to him, in hopes of getting more hair to grow on his head. The pharmacist claimed his potions were magic, and warned Pattison to be careful about what he asked for. Later, Pattison recommended the pharmacist to Pyecraft, who wanted to lose weight. Naturally, they both got what they asked for, and not what they actually wanted. Wells and Jane get involved with Pyecraft's problem, and everything ends well enough for him, in a number of different ways. (Three, is the number of ways, I think.) As for Wells and Jane... they get engaged.

By the time Wells is finished with that story, it is the next morning, and McGillvray accompanies him back home, where he tells her one last story. I must say, throughout the miniseries, I've always wondered how much time passed between each story. I suppose it's all set in 1893, though it seems an awful lot to happen in a single year. Anyway, at the start of the sixth story, Wells and Jane are already married. They have a houseguest named Thomas Keating, who Jane wishes would leave, but Wells likes him, because he's always saying how great he thinks Wells's writing is. (In fact by this point I wouldn't call him a "struggling" writer, though I don't think he'd finished his first novel yet. Somehow, he does seem to have more money than he did at the start of the miniseries.) Wells takes Keating to meet Gibberne, who has a temporary lab assistant- his wife's nephew- since Whittaker was in hospital following some lab accident. Not long after Keating's visit, it turns out that one of the bacilli Gibberne keeps frozen in his lab has gone missing. They're not sure which bacillus it was, but any one of them could be very dangerous, of course. It could be bubonic plague, or anthrax, or any of hundreds of other things. I won't say what it was, in fact, but at least its effects were temporary. And as Wells told McGillvray in 1946, it provided proof of his and Jane's feelings for each other.

And I guess that's all I want to say about the plot of the miniseries. But the whole thing was interesting, and there was quite a bit of humor. And of course the sets and costumes and things were all quite nice. And the acting was pretty good all around. And I think the framing story did a pretty good job of tying together unrelated stories, and of inserting fictionalized versions of Wells and Jane into those stories, to do so. Oh and hey, at one point Wells predicted that the entertainment industry would become much more important, which put me very much in mind of the P.T. Barnum miniseries. Perhaps Barnum and Wells had more in common than I thought. Of course they were both visionaries. And both miniseries were framed by the title characters as old men, with flashbacks to when they were younger. Yes, now that I think of it, it makes a lot of sense having them in the same DVD set. (Yay, synergy!) And... I hope I'm not forgetting anything else I wanted to say.